O.Henry`s - Lucky 32

O.Henry’s
Great Harvest
Meal Challenge
Five chefs,
five ingredients
. . . Let’s eat!
C
BY NANCY OAKLEY • PHOTOGRAPHS BY AMY FREEMAN
all it O.Henry’s take on reality TV.
Borrowing from the format of the popular program Chopped, we asked five local chefs to create something — either a
composed dish or multiple dishes — using
five, locally sourced ingredients typical of the season: pork
sausage (ground or link); sweet potatoes; grits from the Old
Mill at Guilford; greens other than collards; local honey
or homemade jam. We left the definition of “local” open
to interpretation — and in some cases it’s wide open — and
allowed our cooks to use other items in their pantries to
prepare the dishes. We also eliminated the pressure of competition. No judging here; our mission is simply to celebrate
creativity in the kitchen.
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The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Diane
Compton
KITCHEN AND HOME SPECIALIST,
WILLIAMS-SONOMA
“Sometimes a dish will stick in your memory forever,” Diane Compton says, recalling
a five-layered terrine of fried blue, yellow and
corn grits that she’d eaten during a trip to
Santa Fe, New Mexico, long ago. “I tried for
years to replicate the flavor of those grits.
Who knew all I needed was the Old Mill?”
Her spin: layers of white and yellow grits fried
in a Finex cast-iron skillet from WilliamsSonoma, of course, at the Shops at Friendly,
where she teaches cooking classes. Using
honey from Quaker Acres Apiaries that she
discovered at the Greensboro Farmers Curb
Market, she topped the grits with orange
honey butter. “Citrus lightens and brightens
the honey butter. You can add some orange
zest for more pronounced orange flavor,”
Compton adds.
Moving on to the sweet potato, which she
also found at the farmers market, Compton
“opted for easy” with sweet potato soup.
How easy? “Forget peeling and boiling, let’s
roast ’em!” Compton enthuses. “Roasting
concentrates the flavors and they’re super
easy to peel and use,” she explains, and suggests “resisting the urge to overwhelm the
soup with too much onion and garlic. A little
fried bacon works well as a salty counterpoint
to the sweet potato.” She chopped up some
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
chives for color and aroma. “I used housecured bacon from Gate City Butcher and
Gourmet Market.” The chives came from
her own herb garden, something Compton
encourages every cook to cultivate. “As a
transplanted Texan, it is a constant delight
to discover how well things grow in N.C.,”
she observes. She mixed it all together in a
blender, which she says, produces a “wonderful texture” in soups — without added cream
or butter.
For her pièce de resistance, Compton chose
risotto. Again, Gate City Butcher provided
her with the pork: Chef Freddy Gentile’s
sweet Italian sausage, which she sliced and
browned. Using Carnaroli rice instead of
Arborio, a combination of wild mushrooms
and Baby Bellas, and Madeira (“good in cold
weather”), Compton reduced the labor from
what is typically a labor-intensive dish by tossing it all into a pressure cooker. “You can still
get the creamy texture and bite that risotto
devotées love,” she says. Topping it off with a
peppery note that offsets the richness of the
sausage and mushrooms, Compton added
roughly chopped arugula from Flora Ridge
Farm in Mt. Airy. “Add them the last few
minutes before serving,” she advises, “and let
them wilt.”
Why these three dishes? “With the nights
getting cooler and darker, you just kind of
gravitate toward what I would call more
grounded food,” Compton says, admitting
to a more self-interested reason: adding new
options to her repertoire for entertaining.
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Felicia McMillan
EXECUTIVE CHEF AND GENERAL MANAGER,
LUCKY 32 SOUTHERN KITCHEN
Fall, “is more of a challenge, creatively,” says Felicia McMillan,
executive chef and general manager of Lucky 32 in Greensboro. “It’s not
as exciting as the spring and in terms of the produce, you’re extremely
limited — and how many things can you do with butternut squash?” she
says with a twinkle in her eye.
After some consideration, McMillan decided the five fall ingredients
in O.H.’s Harvest Meal Challenge would work well blended together
into a single breakfast dish. “Grits are so versatile, you can make
them savory, sweet. Do whatever you want with them,” she explains.
Recalling a recipe she’d created for pumpkin oatmeal, McMillan hit
upon the idea of making purée from Cedar Hill Farms’ sweet potatoes
(available at the Piedmont Triad Farmers Market on Sandy Ridge Road)
and then mixing it into the grits. “So you have a seemingly sweet grit,”
she notes, the perfect counterpoint for something livelier. “I love sweet
and hot,” McMillan says. “Who doesn’t like sweet and spicy at the same
time?” Her solution: pepper honey.
Her apiary of choice is the Pleasant Bee in Raleigh. “They actually
certify the people in North Carolina who are beekeepers; they’re pretty
fantastic,” McMillan offers. To provide the heat, she thought about adding poblano peppers to the honey but opted for a more familiar favorite,
Texas Pete siracha, aka CHA!
The single, sweet-hot base of grits needed just the right kind of sausage
to complement it. For McMillan, there is only one: Italian sausage from
Hickory Nut Ridge near Asheville. “We are huge, huge fans of theirs. We
are getting every pork we possibly can from them. We’ve been getting
ground beef from them. They are just outstanding small farmers.”
With four out of the five ingredients down, McMillan selected creasy
greens, aka Upland cress, found in the wild in central N.C. “Creasies
have that chicory watercress note to them, so I thought, ‘bring some of
it out with the pepper, but don’t kill it with the honey,’” she says. Just
one problem: Creasy greens were difficult to find, so McMillan substituted with locally produced watercress, which proved “a bummer.”
But no matter, McMillan found her rustic creation “yummy,” overall, thanks in large part to the grits and the sausage. It’s a hearty one,
too, perfect for cold mornings at the family breakfast table. And that’s
what cooking this time of year is all about she says. “When you think
about fall food, it may not be as much celebration of produce, but it’s
home, it’s family, just takes you to a different place.”
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The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Bill Carone
THIRD-YEAR STUDENT, CULIARY ARTS, GTCC
For Bill Carone, third-year student at Guilford Tech’s Culinary Arts program, there’s nothing that says “fall” and “Thanksgiving” like football. In assisting a fellow student at a food competition, he had made a quenelle of grit,
the inspiration for his contribution to the Great Harvest Meal Challenge. “I
thought, ‘OK, I can make these bigger than we did for the competition. And
I’ll make quenelle of grits. And they’ll look like little footballs.’”
Placing them alongside starters of purple sweet potato fries on top of a
purée of sweet potato, sourced from a vendor at the Piedmont Triad Farmers
Market and sweetened with honey from Houser Farms in Vale, North
Carolina, Carone actually decorated the “lacing” on the quenelle “footballs”
with a sauce from homemade red raspberry jam (also from Houser Farms).
He’s a fan of late summer fruit, which he feels is often underused.
Accompanying the quenelle “footballs” on the sweet potato “gridiron”
were sausage patties, actually links that Carone sliced and fried. Using pork
from Circle W Farms in Waughtown, Carone ground the meat in his own
grinder at his home in King. “It’s so easy!” he says. “You can do it in under
ten minutes.” So easy, in fact, that Carone has developed some lamb sausage
profiles to offer to friends who keep Kosher, though casings for them are
tricky to find in these parts. And the casings, or caul fat are key. In order to
achieve the larger size he desired for this challenge, Carone sourced some
sheets of caul fat from a fellow sausage lover, and shaped them. (Pigskin,
anyone?) When making any sausage, he says he likes to go easy on the salt,
so the basic flavors of the meat can shine.
Finishing off the plating, Carone then fashioned a salad of arugula, also
from the Triad Farmers Market and situated it on the “end zone” portion of
his edible football field. Assisting Carone in the organization, chopping and
cleanup were two classmates, first-year student Haley Bird and second-year
student Nicole Summers. “They seemed to enjoy the food, too,” Carone
observes, adding that “Everything turned out way better than I had anticipated.” Touchdown!
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Brian Anderson
EXECUTIVE CHEF, EMERYWOOD FINE FOODS, HIGH POINT
Among diners at Emerywood Fine Foods in High Point there’s a notso-exclusive group called the Clean Plate Club, and Brian Anderson,
the restaurant’s executive chef, does everything in his power to attract
new “members.” His creations for the challenge will likely appear on
Emerywood’s menu — and make his dishwashers’ jobs a lot easier.
What could be more classic than shrimp and grits? Instead of the
usual Andouille sausage, Anderson simply made meatballs out of a local
favorite, Neese’s, and let its inherent spice work magic. Apart from a
little white wine, he didn’t stray too far from the traditional recipe calling for salt, pepper and butter.
For the sweeter companion to the savory, Anderson was a little
more adventurous. “I took some sweet potatoes, seasoned them with
vanilla, nutmeg and cinnamon,” he says, “and made a cake covered in
house-made granola,” a combination of oats baked in sugar, brown cinnamon and honey, mixed together with panko bread crumbs in a food
processor and pan-seared. He added a honey-infused béchamel, a dollop
of house-made fig jam on the side, and to cut the sweetness of all the flavors, topped the cake with a salad of arugula and red peppers, dressed
in balsamic vinegar and olive oil with a garnish of almond slivers. All
of the ingredients, he says, came from the North Carolina section of
his local Harris Teeter. “I wanted to make something nice and elegant.
I also wanted to make a dish that tastes good, where all the flavors go
together,” Anderson explains. “Sweet potatoes complement the honey,
honey complements the figs, put it all together, they complement each
other.” Aesthetics figured into Anderson’s calculation as well: “The
pretty colors in the sweet potatoes and honey remind me of the fall season right when the leaves are about to change, right when the weather is
starting to change, when it starts getting dark around 5:15 or 5:30. You
just want to be home, comfortable, warm, with something nice to eat.”
Or at Emerywood Fine Foods, where, no doubt, you’ll send your
plate back to the kitchen, gleaming.
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The Art & Soul of Greensboro
Trey Bell
EXECUTIVE CHEF AND OWNER, L A RUE
“I like limitations,” says Trey Bell, owner and executive chef of La Rue in downtown. “When you’re a chef, and you cook for other people all night, you get home and you
don’t cook too much,” he says. Recalling the early days of his career, Bell explains how his
wife Cheryl would clean out the fridge on his days off. “She’d lay out all the stuff I’d have
to cook and I’d have to come up with something.” So O.Henry’s proposal of using five local
ingredients appealed to the former college athlete’s competitive streak. “I always push my
own boundaries,” he says.
Bell — and his “pirate crew,” sous-chef Daniel Rider and demi-sous chef Kevin Cottrell
— certainly tested the boundaries with two dishes — and in La Rue’s kitchen, which has no
open flame, only a food dehydrator, induction burners, immersion circulators and a blow
torch. “Breakfast,” is Bell’s spin on boudin blanc, a Louisina dish consisting of sausage
stuffed with rice. In this case, he ground up pork belly from Berkshire pork raised “a
couple of counties away,” and combined it with the Old Mill Grits. “We took dry grits and
added that in as cornmeal, and flash-fried it,” he explains. For greens, Bell made a gratina
of sheep sorrel — that he foraged himself on his farm in Summerfield and seasoned with
rosemary and thyme — a fresh note to the grit-and-sausage balls. As part of the presentation, he served it with toast topped with a compote of raspberries, blackberries and verjus,
the pressed juice of unripened grapes.
For “dessert,” Cottrell whipped up a sweet potato mousse and shaped it into a
quenelle. “That’s a big thing: Do a quenelle and press into it,” he says, pointing to the
imprint in the shape into which he poured honey caramel — made with honey that Bell
harvested from his own apiary (see “The Honeydrippers” p. 68). “I like using local,” Bell
says. “I think foods taste better when they’re at their optimal time.” The sweet potatoes
came from a neighbor up the road from his farm, and in addition to the base for the
mousse, were used as a garnish, alongside a cremeux of blueberry, dollops of yuzu curd
and dustings of powdered honey, powdered King’s Hawaiian streusel and edible blueberry
pistachio soil. It is now a plated dessert on LaRue’s latest menu.
If this is limitation, we’ll gladly order more. OH
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